Master Scheduling EdTech Startup, Abl, Raises $7.5 Million

Ahead of The National Principal’s Conference, Abl Raises $7.5M Series A

With funding out of the way, when Abl heads to Philadelphia next week for the National Principal’s Conference, they can focus on recruiting secondary principals to switch to their platform that takes the headache out of master scheduling.

Although scheduling may be one of the most important parts of an administrators job responsibilities it’s often overlooked for the shiny new LMS or content delivery platform. To this day tens of thousands of secondary administrators and even district level administrators are handling master schedule management with excel spreadsheets, white boards and post it notes.

Abl, founded by Yammer Co-Founder, Adam Pistons, is a comprehensive, dynamic solution for master scheduling. Abl looks at all the data points from other tools to help determine the best scheduling for students, teachers and other administrators.

Did the scheduling work? Normally school administrators would need to wait a couple of weeks after students returned to start getting feedback from both students and teachers as to where the problems in the schedule are. With Abl Principals can practically A/B test various scheduling options and look at models before releasing the final master schedule.

Pisoni is no stranger to startups, data, SaaS or even fundraising. He was the CTO and co-founder of Yammer which was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion dollars. TechCrunch reports that after the acquisition Pisoni stayed on with Microsoft as a Vice President of Product, but that’s when the high school dropout started focusing on how he could help rethink education. Abl was born out of that goal.

The platform has caught the attention of some major investors. The company just raised $7.5 million dollars in a Series A round led by Rethink Education. Sinovation, along with early investors Owl Ventures, Reach Capital and First Round Capital also participated.

Right now Abl is focused on secondary school districts with student populations between 10,000 and 50,000. They plan to start offering their platform to elementary schools in the near future.

You can talk with Abl at the National Principal’s Confrence in Philadelphia, July 9th-11th booth #337 and online at ablschools.com